via Boing Boing by Xeni Jardin
You need this.
And you need to continue reading to see more images and a superb video.
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The Virtues Of The Semicolon; Or, Rebellious Punctuation
posted by S. Abbas Raza in 3 Quarks Daily: Cecelia Watson in Literary Hub:
In 1906, Dutch writer Maarten Maartens – acclaimed in his lifetime but now mostly forgotten – published a surreal, satirical novel called The Healers. The book centres on one Professor Lisse, who has conjured up a potential bioweapon: the Semicolon Bacillus, an “especial variety of the Comma.” The doctor has killed hundreds of rabbits demonstrating the Semicolon’s toxicity, but, at the beginning of the novel, he hasn’t yet succeeded in getting his punctuation past the human immune system, which destroys Semicolons instantly as soon as they enter the mouth.
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Believe you me; if you love well-written prose you will love this article
Believe you me; if you love well-written prose you will love this article
Excerpt adapted from Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark.
Used with the permission of the publisher, Ecco. Copyright © 2019 by Cecelia Watson.==============================
via The Royal Society Repository by Keith Moore
The Gilf Kebir plateau, 1938.
Every so often, I come across an election certificate of a Fellow of the Royal Society that triggers a reaction. I know something about that subject – but where from? The rather dry manuscript relating to Ralph Alger Bagnold FRS (1896-1980) that I looked over recently (reference EC/1944/01) is one of those.
The Society’s deadpan candidature citations often conceal.
You would struggle to learn what Alan Turing is really famous for, looking at his 1951 election certificate (‘His papers on “Computable numbers” in 1936 and following years in which he gave precise meaning to the notion of a “constructive process” in terms of the abstract specification of a computing machine…).
Bagnold’s reference has a little more – ‘During exploration of the Libyan Desert he observed movement of blown sand…’ and of course, I recognized some of the locations mentioned in his wider works (as you would too) from Michael Ondaatje’s novel, and its later movie retelling, The English Patient (1992).
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18 of the Best Synonyms for ‘Lazy’
via Interesting Literature
Alternative words for laziness, compiled by Dr Oliver Tearle
The English language possesses more than a few good words that mean ‘lazy’ or ‘a lazy person’. Below, as well as some of the more common synonyms for ‘lazy’ or ‘laziness’, we’ve trawled the old dictionaries and thesauri to find some of the best little-known synonyms for the word ‘lazy’ and its variations.
Pet Sleeping Dream Kitty Animal Cat Soft Cute
but do not call the cat lazy!
Continue reading and discover some wonderful words.
Continue reading and discover some wonderful words.
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via Ancient Origins: Gabriel D. Wrobel in The Conversation
Castillo fortress at sunrise. Do trophy skulls help explain the collapse of the once great empire? Maya Source: soft_light / Adobe Stock
Two trophy skulls , recently discovered by archaeologists in the jungles of Belize , may help shed light on the little-understood collapse of the once powerful Classic Maya civilization.
The defleshed and painted human skulls , meant to be worn around the neck as pendants, were buried with a warrior over a thousand years ago at Pacbitun, a Maya city. They likely represent gruesome symbols of military might: war trophies made from the heads of defeated foes.
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via the Guardian by Nicola Davis
Big cats such as the puma were prowling around the southern Andes towards the end of the last ice age, but humans and their animals only arrived 11,000 years ago. Photograph: Alejandro Insegna
Coprolite reveals felines in southern Andes had roundworm 17,000 years ago, long before humans got there
Big cats such as the puma were prowling around the southern Andes towards the end of the last ice age, but humans and their animals only arrived 11,000 years ago.
The compact, gnarled and knobbly specimen looks like a root of ginger. In fact, it’s 17,000-year-old puma poo, and it contains the oldest parasite DNA yet recorded.
The team of researchers behind the discovery say the finding not only confirms that the felines were prowling around the Andes towards the end of the last ice age, but reveals that they were infested with roundworm long before humans and their animals turned up.
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How to make a paper airplane that circles "endlessly"
via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz
Dominic of The Viral Video Lab demonstrates a paper airplane that will circle "endlessly" when caught in the airstream of seven personal fans. Of course, proper positioning of the plane is key.
"It took me about 35 takes to create this video," Dominic writes.
Below is a video on folding your own "Infinity Paper Plane."
(via Laughing Squid)
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via Interesting Literature
Are these the best examples of nonsense verse in English? Selected by Dr Oliver Tearle
Nonsense literature is one of the great subsets of English literature, and for many of us a piece of nonsense verse is our first entry into the world of poetry. In this post, we’ve selected ten of the greatest works of nonsense poetry.
We’ve omitted several names from this list, including Dr Seuss (because his best nonsense verse, whilst brilliant, is longer than the short-poem form, often comprising book-length narratives), Hilaire Belloc (whose best work is best-understood as part of the ‘cautionary verse’ tradition, which isn’t as nonsensical as bona fide nonsense verse), and Ogden Nash, whose work seems to be less in the nonsense verse tradition than more straightforward comic verse. Some of these suggestions come courtesy of Quentin Blake’s The Puffin Book of Nonsense Verse (Puffin Poetry), which we’d recommend to any fans of nonsense verse looking for an anthology of beautiful nonsense.
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via Ancient Origins by Roberto Volterri
Dr Roberto Volterri in Teotihuacán, on top of the Pyramid of the Sun.In the background is the 'Calzada de los Muertos' and the Pyramid of the Moon clearly visible.
As ancient Egyptian architects gazed up at the night sky and built the three pyramids of Giza based on the celestial plan of the Constellation of Orion , so millennia apart and at the other side of the world, in Mexico at Teotihuacan, architects similarly took their inspiration from Orion to construct their pyramids, with a slight deviation that can be explained by examining the sky on the date of the Winter Solstice, December 22.Continue reading
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via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow
Pillman is Oscar "Nanochess" Toledo's re-implementation of Pacman ("a game about a yellow man eating pills") in 512 bytes -- small enough to fit in a boot sector -- written in 8088 assembler. (via Four Short Links)
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